With BMW vastly expanding their car lineup and adding completely new types of cars to the list, this year proved to be quite fruitful for the manufacturer.

August is a record holder considering BMW sales, as were a couple other months this year.

The magic number of cars which the German car maker managed to sell in August was a whooping 145.902 units. By comparison, August of 2013 only managed to sell 139.650 units, which is quite the difference. The relatively new Chinese market took a big chunk of that sales, making the Asia the best selling region for BMW.

This is the first time this is happening, but somehow it doesn’t seem that surprising. According to the press release, sales are still growing, and BMW officials are quite confident that they will manage to break the 2 million units sold in 2014. I have a feeling this will indeed happen, even if the end of the year is closing in.

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Marcus M.

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While the BMW brand has only just introduced its first front wheel drive, the BMW Group as a whole already has plenty of them.

A recent report states that by 2020, up to 40% of the whole sales in the group will be made up by said FWD vehicles.

These figures will come mainly thanks to the UKL platform, which is rumored to underpin up to 12 Bimmers and 10 MINI vehicles. Now this raises a series of other questions, and the most important one has to be: “how many more BMWs will adopt a front wheel drive configuration?”

While that is unknown for now, BMW official did feel it was important to stress the fact that from the 3 Series upwards, front wheel will definitely not be applied. He also stated that the M variants and the M Performance goodies will also be exclusive to the traditional rear wheel drive BMWs.

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Marcus M.

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It seems that BMW has great plans with the 2-Series Active Tourer. Frank Niederlaender from BMW told in an interview that the new model will attract first-time BMW buyers.

The percentage he suggested is quite impressive, saying that 75% of the future BMW 2-Series Active Tourer will be new to the brand.

The new BMW 2-Series Active Tourer wants to be a rival for models such as the Mercedes B-Class or VW Touran. BMW says that the new model should appeal to a new category of buyers which in the past, could have preferred the rival models.

If the five-seat model is not roomy enough, you have to know that a seven-seat model is currently under development.

All in all, it remains to be seen if the front-wheel drive MPV model, a quite new type of vehicle in BMW’s portfolio, will manage to steal some clients from the rival brands.

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Marcus M.

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The Germans at BMW seem to have a quite good fall in terms of sales. To be more specific, BMW Group managed to sell a total of 158,029 vehicles which makes the last month the best September ever for the company.

Compared to the same month of 2012, BMW’s sales saw an increase of 7,6% with the new BMW 3 Series recording the biggest improvement of nearly 14%.

Other brands of the group such as MINI reported improvements of 2,5% last month for a total of 31,313 vehicles. Lastly, the Bavarians report a total of 1,209,598 cars sold from the beginning of the year.

Best-selling models were the BMW X1, X3 and also the new-generation 5 Series. Even the BMW Motorrad recorded a slight increase in sales together with Rolls Royce which sold only 2,300 vehicles this year, an improvement of 0,5%.

“Despite initial signs of stabilisation in the European automobile market, conditions in many countries remain challenging,” says BMW.

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Marcus M.

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BMW i3 and i8 are the latest electric vehicles that the German car maker pushed up front and as expected, plans for gaining the general interest are still under development.

These days for instance BMW has announced that the main markets for selling i8, the unit that should be officially introduced this year during Frankfurt Motor Show, are Germany, Great Britain and USA.

Just to make yourself an idea on how motivated and dedicated they are, we shall mention the recently partnership signed with Schneider Electric, in an attempt of providing home charging installation services in UK.

If you have been following the news on BMW’s sales strategy, you must have also heard about the intention of providing sales and test drive scheduling options over the internet, a plan that has been intensively criticized by numerous dealers.

Back to our initial topic of discussion, BMW is targeting no less than 50 markets from around the world, with USA being the most important one, particularly for i8. Nevertheless, French buyers are also expected to manifest interest.

Above all these, perhaps the most important information is that BMW is targeting men of around 35 years, always up to date with technology upgrades and, naturally, with high finances.

Before buying such a car, those interested in it can try different types of BMWs in order to choose the proper one that suits them best.

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Marcus M.

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The anxiously expected BMW i3, announced to be officially presented on 29th of July, is not only going to revolutionize the EV segment of the German car maker, but also introduce the online sales option.

According to Lorraine Kruger, sales director of BMW Group, the officials are considering pushing the new i3 electric car towards online sales, with serious intentions of extending this feature for all their other units, in the near future.

Under the pretext that times are changing, buyers’ needs and expectations are changing and BMW’s offerings should adjust to these changes, the auto maker is actually trying to implement a cost saving campaign.

Even so, the possibility of booking test drives online and have the BMW delivered to your door, or making service schedules online are rather tempting opportunities.

If it will be put into practice, the BMW units will be available online in Germany and only in the most important cities, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and several others included. Nevertheless, it would mean that over 40 small outlets should be closed.

The negative impact on brick and mortar centers is definitely something to make BMW dealers oppose to this change of strategy. One of their arguments – which, we have to admit, is quite pertinent – is that all these features might make the company deal with buyers who have no real intention of purchase!

What do you think of BMW’s proposal? Are there facilities that can be transferred online and options that should stay in offline no matter what?

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Marcus M.

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To connoisseurs, Daimler is a German multinational automotive corporation with Mercedes Benz in its portfolio. Knowing about the fierce competition for the first place on the market between Mercedes and BMW, one would have expected for Daimler boss to talk more about the brand it represents…

Even so, Dieter Zetsche, general director of Daimler, claims that they are not going to take the first place in terms of sales by the end of 2013, even though he is not sure that this will apply to BMW as well.

With other words, an official from the competitors’ bench expresses the belief that BMW will take the first place this year. We would add – this year, again, after BMW had the same position in 2011 and in 2012.

The rivals from the second place are having big plans to achieve by 2020 – meaning to finally overcome BMW in terms of sales, even though Bavarian Motors will not just sit back and wait to be outnumbered.

Even so, the markets are more or less stable these days, with car makers reporting excess capacity and low sales. How ill BMW and its German competitors sort things out will be interesting to see!

Meanwhile, BMW and Mercedes are not just fighting for sales, but also for supremacy on the luxury US auto market!

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Marcus M.

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Without a doubt, the past six months have been market by a fierce competition taken by BMW on the most important markets throughout the world.

Keeping Audi and Mercedes Benz under scrutiny as main competitors, winning various prizes for different auto categories on numerous contest, the famous German car maker somehow managed to stay on top.

Consequently, the sales numbers for the first six months of 2013 are looking great, placing BMW ahead of the previously mentioned Audi and Mercedes.

Of course, all three German brands are doing well, yet we cannot help but notice how BMW is taking the highest leap, being the only one to outnumber the threshold of 800.000 units sold in half of year.

To be more specific, BMW sold 954.521.000 by the end of June, a number that sets an 8% increase as compared to the numbers from last year. And to make everything even better, analysts claim it will continue to stay on top for the following months as well.

Wondering about competitors? Long story short, Audi sold 780.500 units and Mercedes Benz 694.000 units.

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Marcus M.

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To those who were anxiously looking into BMW’s marketing strategies on the Asian market, things have started to move again.

After the introduction of the new BMW 3 series GT on what is considered to be the world’s largest auto market, the officials make bold future predictions.

According to BMW China Trading’s president, Xu Zhijun, they are still having positive signals from the market, while the sales for luxury units are still high, even though they are currently registering a descending trend.

By a descendant trend we mean that the margins drop down with anything in between 1 and 2 %, in a context where BMW’s sales numbers are due to the Chinese market in percent of 15 to 20!

Therefore, despite the optimistic statements we have witnessed, the Chinese buyers are orienting themselves more and more towards cheaper and more compact cars, leaving aside the highly exclusive and expensive models.

Looking forward to see how will BMW handle these tendencies, we will focus, in the meantime, on the evolution of sales on other major markets as well.

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Marcus M.

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It seems that the German car maker has reason to celebrate as the month of April brought the best figures BMW has yet to register in a single month.

This is in no small part due to the American and the sprawling Asian markets.

The number of BMWs sold in April is a respectable 155.419, representing a 6.8 percent increase from the last year’s mark of 145.541 units. And this wasn’t just a random occurrence, as BMW has seen a steady increase since the year began. The first four months brought an increase in sales by 5.7 percent, setting the 603.619 units record. Increase in sales was seen even in the “old continent”, with Europe appreciating a smaller 2.8 percent.

BMW vehicles that brought in the clients are the X1, the ever popular 3 Series and 5 Series, with the British brand Mini also doing well under German tutelage. Last month, the BMW X1 sold 11.837 units, while the 3 and 5-er sold 38.491 and 29.955 units respectively.

Mini managed to sell 24.581 units, with the favorite model being the Paceman. Their increase was just 3.3 percent, which, albeit a little lower, is still an increase. All in all, BMW is doing quite well, and seems to have earned its place as Forbes’ best car maker.

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Marcus M.

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